Be My Victim and other Strange Tales from the Cape

by Andre Beerwinkel

  "How could you have seen one if they lived so long ago? All of them must be dead by now."

  "Witches never die," was all he said in a very dramatic tone.

  What made these stories even spookier - and thus more enjoyable - was the fact that there were no electricity in the whole village. These stories were then always told by a light that flickered and gave motion to all the darkness around one. Small innocent little things would suddenly become huge monsters without form, which danced evilly against the walls or on the ceiling.

  In those days it was just normal not to have electricity. It was only in the cities and the super-rich people in the rural areas who actually had electricity. But strangely we never missed it, because all our stuff worked without any electricity.

  We even had a refrigerator that work with paraffin. We were one of the very few families that had a fridge and many people asked my mother to keep their perishables in our refrigerator. We further used oil lamps and candles to illuminate our house when the sun went down in the evenings. We also had this special lamp that was as bright as any electric light. It made such a hissing sound when it was on, because it work with paraffin that came out under pressure.

  To cook our food, we used the Primus stove or our wood burning stove.

  And this is where the story really starts:

  For to keep the stoves going, we needed wood. That is something that couldn't be bought in a shop in those days, so we had to go to the nearby forest to fetch our own wood. We did this about once or sometimes even twice a week.

  Being friends with Jeffrey thus automatically put me in the wood gathering group. Jeffrey's father also brought wood for our house at the request of my mother, and this actually made me an official participant in the whole wood-gathering expedition.

  Gathering wood was actually a very enjoyable experience and also very simple. All one needed was a good axe or a saw or both and a wooden cart. If you didn't have a cart, you could simply bind the wood that you gathered together with a piece of string and carry it home on your shoulder or on your head. It was easy and most importantly free.

  It would be me, Jeffrey, Jeffrey's father, Peter and the dog, Rex…and a huge push cart, that Jeffrey's father build. This cart had four huge bicycle wheels and could even be steered with some ropes. It was all very neat. Sometimes I would sit in it while the others pushed me and I steered the huge cart through the rough forest pathways.

  Jeffrey and I would gather smaller pieces of wood, while his father and Peter used the axe and saw to gather bigger pieces of wood. The dog would run around, his tail wagging and making it seem as if he was hunting wild animals, but not being very successful.

  Jeffrey and I would at the same that we gathered wood, also explore the forest.

  It is difficult to describe that forest, because one had to be there to really understand what it was like. In the first place when one entered the forest you could feel that it was alive. Not a spooky kind of alive, but a real invigorating alive with leaves rustling in the wind, dried branches crackling under your feet, little insects everywhere and birds singing invisibly in the trees. Silence in that forest was always filled with millions of little noises like that. Sometimes I even imagined that I could hear the giant trees sucking up the clear water from deep beneath the earth.

  Then it would take that water, through thin veins by capillary action high up that tree up to the topmost branches and leaves. When one looked up one could see that some of those trees went up forever and the only thing stopping them was the bright blue of the sky. There were places in the wood where there were so many high trees that they blotted out the sun and it was a bit dark there. But the strange thing is that it never felt spooky, because even there one could feel that the forest was there as a protector, as a benevolent organism that was there to protect and help us.

  And that fresh forest smell is something that stays with one forever. Eucalyptus and Oak and Silver Birch and the Maple trees.

  There were lots of rabbits in that forest as well as some squirrels. We also saw some tortoises, but I was scared of them, why I don't know. We even saw a gazelle one day, but he saw us before we saw him and was gone in a flash, without even making the leaves rustle.

  And then the little footpaths. I always wondered how the paths came there, but Jeffrey told me that it was made there by people from the olden days. I accepted that answer. When we were in the forest I tried my level best never to think of the witches, that his father told us about. My wild imagination assumed that this would be a place for them to gather.

  But the strange thing about those little footpaths was that it was always an adventure to explore them, especially if it was one we didn't use before, because one never knew where it would take us. As a matter of fact sometimes these paths took us to wide open spaces in the middle of the forest. When we stood in that open space, the forest would look like a huge round wall around us.

  There were times when we came upon toadstools that was arranged in a perfect circle in the forest. Jeffrey's father would then tell us to avoid that area, because the devils danced there at night. Even I really didn't believe him, but for safety's sake stayed away.

  The feeling of that forest really was something that would stay with me my whole life through. The next year when I went to school in the city, I could tell lots of stories about the forest in the mornings at NEWS TELLING time, in class. My teacher loved it, because it was totally different from the stories the other children always told. These children didn’t have the privilege of growing up in a rural village – like I had.

  In any case, it was on one of me and Jeffrey's exploration journeys in the forest that we discovered the house.

  We drifted off the usual footpath and away from the cart and the others and started following our noses into the forest, knowing it would be easy to find the others again.

  We found a path that was a bit wider than they usually are and just followed it. This footpath gradually chanced into a chalky white-yellow path. We walked along this white-yellowish footpath seeing how our feet became white with the fine dust of the path. I really don't know if it was chalk or what it was.

  It was only later that we found out it was sulfur or brimstone.

  The area gradually changed from a bushy area to a huge open plain with huge mounds of the same yellow-whitish material the footpath was made of. There was also this strange achromatic smell in the air. And a strange whistling wind blowing making the white stuff swirl in the air.

  And then we saw the little house. The house seemed so strange and totally out of place amongst the giant yellow-white mounds. It didn't fit there at all. We approached the house and saw that it was even fenced in with thin wooden poles that must have been taken from the same forest we just came from. The builder used bigger stones of the same yellow white material to mark out the footpath that led from the gate to the door. There was a beautiful type of gravel on the actual footpath.

  We entered the yard and went onto the stoep. The strange thing was that under normal circumstances we would never have just approached a strange house, especially one in an area where we have never been before, but both of us felt this strange feeling to just explore and enter the house.

  The area was completely desolated and this house was the only sign of life around there. Except for the few droopy plants in the little garden and on the stoep, there wasn't even stuff growing in the area.

  There were two wooden benches and a lot of pot plants on the stoep. The plants, though, looked worse for wear.

  There was the very nice aromatic smell of a wood burning oven as well as freshly brewed black coffee coming from the inside of the house.

  We knocked on the door of the cottage.

  After several knocks there was no answer.

  Jeffrey tested the door by turning the handle and the door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges. I must admit we were both a bit apprehensive to enter, but it was as if something was driving us to enter that desolated house on that
strange yellowish-white plain. We had already comee this far, so we could just as well continue.

  And the other thing is that I didn't felt scared at all. Maybe it was because the sun was shining brightly on the outside and there was no sign of any danger. This would become a totally different story once we were inside the house.

  We called out several times as we entered the house. On the inside the cottage was rather empty, devoid of furniture, with just a table or a chair standing here and there. There were not the many decorations and paraphernalia that these type of cottages are known for. The front door lead to a small lobby with the entrance to the lounge just across from the front door. The lounge was big and looked comfortable.

  We first stood in the doorway of the lounge looking around, with the front door still wide open where we could still see the sunlight and smell the fresh air. This would soon be something of the past for us. Then we entered the lounge. It was also rather empty with some soft furnishings in the one corner and a desk with some books on the other. It smelled very nice, but above that nice smell, we could still smell the wood burning stove and the freshly brewed coffee.

  It think it was this homely smelled that gave us the courage and the curiosity to further explore the house.

  We made out mistake when we exited the lounge from the other door which lead to a passage.

  The mistake we made was to lose sight of the front door.

  We would only learn this later on when it was much too late.

  As we went out from the lounge we suddenly saw two youngish boys entering the one room that was on the other side of the passage. We immediately called out to them and ran towards that room. I don't know what made me turn around, but just before we entered that room I looked around to the door we just came from. There I saw the same two boys coming TOWARDS us.

  And those two boys looked exactly like me and Jeffrey, they even had the same clothes on and the same white powered feet.

  AND, the one who looked like me, was looking around back to the lounge.

  This was really like looking into a mirror, but one that had a time lag sometimes and at other time moved at a faster time rate. As I tried to tell Jeffrey this, we were already inside the room.

  It was a large bedroom with only the big queen sized bed, a cupboard a rocking chair and a little bedside cabinet. On the one end of the room was a large wall sized mirror.

  The only thing strange about this mirror was the fact that everything in the room was reflected in it, EXCEPT US. We were standing right in front of that mirror, but we were not there.

  "No!” Jeffrey cried out, as he grabbed me by the hand. "This is a bewitched house…we must get out…quick." As we ran down the passage I told him about the two boys - that was actually us -that I saw leaving the lounge.

  As we ran down the passage in the direction of what we thought was the front door we heard running footsteps behind us. We looked around and saw the two boys – who were actually us, or a reflection of us - looking behind them as they came towards us.

  We started running as panic started setting in. But as we ran at top speed, we realized that we were always the same distance from the wall as at the beginning. In short, we were running at top speed, but staying in one spot. But this wasn't like running on one spot. We were running at full speed, but the wall just stayed the exact same distance from us, no matter how hard we ran. Every time we looked around at the other two boys they were also looking around. I am sure it was us or a reflection of us, because they were exactly the same size and wore the exact same clothes we were wearing.

  It WAS us, but just in another dimension. We were the only living beings in that house. Or at least I hoped so.

  We weren't reflected in the mirror, but something else in this house was reflecting us in the most weird and scary way.

  Jeffrey decided to change tactics. This time we ran straight to the end of the passage, past the door where we entered from the lounge. We were now in the kitchen. It was a huge kitchen. It had a wood burning stove on the one end and a big table in the middle with some wooden chairs. The fire was on in the stove and there was actually a pot of coffee standing on the one hot plate. So the coffee we smelled before we entered this nightmare was real and this also meant that there were someone else around there.

  So we HAD to get out, because we definitely didn't want to meet whoever it was.

  The strange thing about this kitchen was that it looked exactly the same from all sides. It didn't matter where you stood in the kitchen it seemed as if you were looking at a reflection of it. The door that led to the outside was there, but once again we couldn't reach it, no matter how hard we tried. The more we tried to reach it, the more it wasn't there when we got to it and we were in the exact same spot where we started from.

  Jeffrey started praying loudly, but it was to no avail. I told him that we had to go back and try to reach the front door through the lounge again.

  We turned around and rushed out the door where we entered the kitchen, planning to find a way back to the lounge and the front door.

  With this we were immediately out in the sunshine standing by the gate where we entered the property.

  Boy, where we relieved.

  The house looked exactly the same as we first saw it from the outside with the smell of a wood stove burning and freshly brewed coffee. But we knew that nothing would ever get us back into that house again.

  We ran down the forest paths and were quickly back with the others. No one believed us when we told them what happened. They didn't even want to go check out the place with us.

  Jeffrey's father said that it is only the sulfur mines that are on that side and he was there many times and there are no houses.

  “Why, only the Devil would want to have a house in a brimstone mine...” he laughed.

  Today I am sure we wouldn't even have found the house again if we went looking for it.

  What is even stranger than all that happened that day is that to this day I still don't know if that incident really happened or if it was just a dream?

  If only I could get Jeffrey to confirm that this really happened…

  After that incident Jeffrey and I discussed that house many times. Jeffrey must have thought about it a lot, because later he told me several times that he will at some stage return to that house and try and find out what its secret was.

  I and my family left for the city the next year. The years rolled by and Niewedorp became a sweet, far off memory. My adventures in Niewedorp were always in the back of my mind. I was always thinking of returning there and thirty three years later I just took my car and took a road-trip to Niewedorp.

  On entering the little village I wasn’t surprised at all that everything seemed almost exactly like we left it thirty three years before. I went straightaway to Jeffrey's house. Everybody was very glad to see me. His father, Mr Donson was still alive.

  Everybody was still there, except for Jeffrey.

  When I asked Mister Donson about his son Jeffrey, he looked strangely at me and said I must be mistaken, he never had a son by the name of Jeffrey...

  GHOSTS IN VALHALLA PARK

  Every evening as the sun sets over the Cape Flats a million demons materialize out of the shadow world. A million demons come out to feast on those unwary wanderers of the night. A million demons come out to haunt the shadowy streets and eat the children. Those are the people who died in gang-fights, or was murdered while walking in the street, or wives who has been killed by their drugged up husbands. They are all still here and just waiting to pounce on the unwary and get their revenge.

  Page holds the Barbie doll closer to her chest with her one hand, while holding tightly onto her mother’s dress with the other hand as they get off the train at Netreg station. They are going to sleep at her daddy’s house tonight. It is already late and a gloomy dusk is starting to settle in over the township, but bright lights chase the shadows away all over the platform of the train station.

  Knowing that sh
e is going to see her daddy again fills the seven year old girl with excitement. She loves her daddy very much. He always have lots of presents for her. He also gives her lots of money while they visit him and when they leave he also gives money to her mommy to keep for her.

  Page loves both her mommy and daddy very much and it made her sad because they can’t all live together. She asked this question many times and her mommy explained that Daddy has to stay in Valhalla Park, because of his business. If he leaves there he won’t make any money. And they can’t stay with him, because of all the noisy and mostly drunk people that hangs around his house every day. She never understood that and would enjoy having her daddy with her every day.

  So once or twice a month she and her mommy takes the train from Bellville - where they live with grandma - to Netreg Station. From the station they would walk to her daddy’s house in Valhalla Park.

  She never liked this area. It feels dangerous. And dirty. The people are always in a hurry and they swear loudly and many times they fight with each other. Their screaming and loud talking scares her. And the place is always dirty with old newspapers and plastic shopping bags blowing in the wind and all kinds of rubbish lying around. The smell of burned tyres and rotten fruit and petrol and sour wine is always hanging over the area like an evil mist. And those strange men who are always standing on the street corners. They would look her and mommy all over. They have such weird eyes and those strange grins. They always look like people who stand there for a purpose, but she never saw them doing anything. Although she is only seven years old, the way that they looked at her always makes her feel dirty and icky... and very scared. At times like these she just wants to run away, but then she feels the strength of her mommy next to her and she holds her hand very tight and smiles at her.